Billix: a Sysadmin's Swiss Army Knife

A few things can go wrong when converting a USB key to run
Billix (or any USB-based distribution). The most common issue is for the
USB drive to fail to boot the system. This can be due to several things. Older
systems often split USB disk support into USB-Floppy emulation and
USB-HDD emulation. For Billix to work on these systems, USB-HDD needs
to be enabled. If your drive came with the U3 Windows-based software
vault, this typically needs to be disabled or removed prior to installing
Billix.

If you're seeing “MBR123” or something similar in the
upper-left
corner, but the system is hanging, you have a misconfigured MBR. Try
install-mbr again, and make sure to use the -p1 switch. You will need to
run syslinux again after running install-mbr. If all else fails, you
probably need to wipe the USB drive and begin again. Back up the data on
the USB drive, then use fdisk to build a new partition table (make sure
to set it as FAT or FAT32). Use mkfs.vfat (with the -F 32 switch if it's
a FAT32 filesystem) to build a new blank filesystem, untar the tarball
again, and run install-mbr and syslinux on the newly defined filesystem.

Damn Small Linux is a miniature version of Knoppix (it actually has
much of the automatic hardware-detection routines of Knoppix in it). As
such, it makes an excellent rescue environment, or it can be used as a
quick “trusted desktop” in the event you need to
“borrow” a friend's
computer to do something. I have used DSL in the past to
commandeer a system temporarily at a cybercafé, so I could log in to work and fix a
sick server. I've even used DSL to boot and mount a corrupted Windows
filesystem, and I was able to save some of the data. DSL is fairly full-featured for its size, and it comes with two window managers (JWM or
Fluxbox). It can be configured to save its data back to the USB disk in
a persistent fashion, so you always can be sure you have your critical
files with you and that it's easily accessible.

All the Linux distribution installations have one thing in common:
they are all network-based installs. Although this is a good thing for
Billix, as they take up very little space (around 10MB for each distro),
it can be a bad thing during installation as the installation time will
vary with the speed of your Internet connection. There is one other
upside to a network-based installation. In many cases, there is no
need to update the newly installed operating system after installation,
because the OS bits that are downloaded are typically up to date.
Note that when using the Red Hat-based installers (CentOS 4.6, CentOS 5.1
and Fedora 8), the system may appear to hang during the download
of a file called minstg2.img. The system probably isn't hanging; it's
just downloading that file, which is fairly large (around 40MB), so it
can take a while depending on the speed of the mirror and the speed of
your connection. Take care not to specify the USB disk accidentally at
the install target for the distribution you are attempting to install.

The memtest86 utility has been around for quite a few years, yet it's a
key tool for a sysadmin when faced with a flaky computer. It does
only one thing, but it does it very well: it tests the RAM of a system very
thoroughly. Simply boot off the USB drive, select memtest from the menu,
and press Enter, and memtest86 will load and begin
testing the RAM of the system immediately. At this point, you can remove the USB drive
from the computer. It's no longer needed as memtest86 is very small and
loads completely into memory on startup.

The ntpwd Windows password “cracking” tool can be a controversial tool,
but it is included in the Billix distribution because as a system
administrator, I've been asked countless times to get into Windows
systems (or accounts on Windows systems) where the password has been
lost or forgotten. The ntpwd utility can be a bit daunting, as the UI is
text-based and nearly nonexistent, but it does a good job of mounting
FAT32- or NTFS-based partitions, editing the SAM account database and
saving those changes. Be sure to read all the messages that ntpwd
displays, and take care to select the proper disk partition to edit. Also,
take the program's advice and nullify a password rather than trying to
change it from within the interface—zeroing the password works
much more reliably.

DBAN (otherwise known as Darik's Boot and Nuke) is a very good “nuke it
from orbit” hard disk wiper. It provides various levels of wipe, from a
basic “overwrite the disk with zeros” to a full DoD-certified, multipass
wipe. Like memtest86, DBAN is small and loads completely into memory, so
you can boot the utility, remove the USB drive, start a wipe and move
on to another system. I've used to this to wipe clean disks on systems
before handing them over to a recycler or before selling a system.

That would really be great!
I modified billix already to use full installation ISO's, but we also use FreeBSD installation so it would be really really great if we can also include those installation on the USB.
Thanks!

while troubleshooting why my thumb drive wouldn't boot, I came across a forum post that was about installing
Ubuntu on a flash drive from windows, and there was mention of using the m and a options for syslinux if you were running it from Windows. It says it is not needed for the *nix version but is definitely needed for the Windows version. the post is here: http://jsco.org/dectop/

I was extremely excited to read this article. I ran out and purchased a 512 Kingston DT games USB($9.99US), and get to
running this line >> syslinux -s {device},and syslinux is telling me that i don't have a valid FAT filesystem; when i do have a valid FAT filesystem. Where can i for help?

I continue to have the same problem, and have not yet found a solid answer on how to fix it. when I run the install-mbr, it is doing something to the thumb drive that will not allow syslinux to see it as a valid partition anymore. I also get the "this doesn't look like a valid FAT filesystem" error.

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